[mb-users] "The need for free and open music metadata", but MB not good enough

[mudcrow]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Jim DeLaHunt <from.nabble at jdlh.com> wrote:

>
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm back at MusicBrainz after a couple of months paying attention to other
> projects. (Amazing, the mb-style list didn't clean up all the rest of the
> CSG while I was away. I still get to play.)
>
> I found an interesting blog post by a music web entrepreneur here in
> Vancouver, David Gratton.
>
> "The need for free and open music metadata" (February 19, 2008)
> <
> http://www.davidrdgratton.com/blog/the-need-for-free-and-open-music-metadata
> >
> "Non-profits are simply the stable entity for offering metadata, whereas
> private companies will be inherently unstable. Music metadata is factual
> content about known items. As such the cost of acquisition of this data is
> quite low and falling. The price of metadata, like that of music will
> approach 'near free'."
>
> Very validating for those of us contributing to MusicBrainz.
>
> But read on: "Why didn't Music Brainz make it as the default service?
> It was staffed by wonderful, incredibly smart, and committed people who
> understand the need for a free and open metadata service. However, in my
> opinion Music Brainz is simply way to complex, tedious, and time consuming
> to update. Wikipedia on the other hand is dead simple. End of story.
> However, the Music Brainz still has a lot to offer as we discovered."


But musicbrainz is a database, not bloody wikipedia, and I bloody hate
bloody wikipedia.

Interesting that he lists among the cons of musicbrainz "incomplete and
inaccurate content" while for the pros of wikipedia "in depth and highly
accurate data". I guess he hasn't looked at many album entries at wikipedia.

And why has he compared musicbrainz to allmusic, wikipedia and
audioscrobbler (?!?), maybe he should look at other music databases to
compare ease of use such as discogs or rateyourmusic.
Music data is based on simple facts, you have a track list, you have
musicians, there's not much room for opinionated wiki glorification.


Sounds like another wiki lover who thinks everything should be wikified,
blind to the fact that wikipedia is full of inaccurate, unchecked info and
trawled by wankers who delight in deleting anything and everything they deem
to be not notable enough.

But I'm biased as I'm proud to be a wiki hater.
Mud


>
> Hence, he intends to make his own: "So to solve this problem we have taken
> Wikipedia and joined it to Music Brainz to get structured Wikipedia music
> metadata. That's cool and useful. At least we think it is. We will be
> offering it as a free 'for commercial use' Web service in a few
> months...."
>
> David Gratton is a thoughtful guy. After I met him, I added his blog to my
> daily reading list.  I like what he's trying to do with his Project Opus.
> Thus I was disappointed to hear that he thought the way ahead was to make
> something different from MusicBrainz instead of contributing to
> MusicBrainz
> itself. It made me stop and think about what it is about MusicBrainz that
> causes him to write it off as "way [too] complex, tedious, and time
> consuming to update".
>
> One of my ambitions is to make MusicBrainz a little simpler, easier, and
> faster to update.



Good luck with that.



>
>
> -----
>     -- http://jdlh.com/ Jim DeLaHunt , Vancouver, Canada  •
> http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/JimDeLaHunt
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://www.nabble.com/%22The-need-for-free-and-open-music-metadata%22%2C-but-MB-not-good-enough-tp16910670s2885p16910670.html
> Sent from the Musicbrainz - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
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